Washington Decoded

Trump and the JFK Collection: What More to Come?

 

By Robert Reynolds

 

    The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) returned to the news in 2024, with then presidential-candidate Donald Trump claiming credit for releasing stacks of withheld records during his first term, and vowing to release what remained during a second term.

    Trump did indeed open many records from the collection in 2017-2018. But his administration left thousands of records redacted as well, and the release process itself was less than transparent, with press speculation and anonymous second- or third-hand sourcing taking the place of documentation and comprehension.

    Following Trump 1.0, the Biden administration also had a crack at the records, restoring much text that had been redacted from documents, but still leaving blanks in as many as 3,000 records. That gave Trump 2.0 one more chance to tantalize the public with the prospect of new revelations.

    What are the prospects for more releases? In the past, the dearth of information on the Trump 1.0 releases made it hard to prognosticate how release of the small remaining set of redacted records might play out. Fortunately, a Freedom of Information request to the National Archives has made new documentation available on the 2017-2018 release process, shedding useful light on future releases.[1]

    More releases will certainly come, but what about prospects for revelations? There has been more than enough time to sift through and weigh the meaning of the increasingly elusive redactions in the collection, and as the fortune-telling 8 ball says, “Outlook not so good.”

Releasing JFK Records: A Look Back

    The JFK Assassination Records Collection (ARC) is the US government’s primary collection of records on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, subsequent investigations of Kennedy’s death, and the cold war background of the assassination.

    The collection was established by the 1992 JFK Act, which gave final custody of the records to the National Archives and Research Administration (NARA). The act also created a limited-term federal board, the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), to secure, review, and oversee the release of the records. By the time the Board closed its doors in 1998, it had placed more than 300,000 records in the collection, about 88 percent of which were released in full.

    Why were 12 percent of ARC records not released in full, or in federal governmentese, portions of these documents were “redacted”? The JFK Act allowed for postponing sensitive government and personal information in the records, up until a final release date of 26 October 2017. Departments, bureaus, and agencies were permitted to request redactions, subject to case-by-case review by the ARRB. Even though the ARRB established strict guidelines, 12 percent of the records met the board's criteria for postponements of one kind or another, for periods of time ranging from a few years up until October 2017.

    What has to be remembered though is that the ARRB was determined to release, before going out of business, any and all records judged central to the assassination story, and it succeeded in this task. Board members and staffers have always, and vigorously, defended the Board’s record in this regard. As ARRB chairman John Tunheim told author Vincent Bugliosi, “The Board protected [postponed] nothing, not one document or page, that was centrally related [emphasis added] to the facts of the assassination itself.”

    This key point that cannot be stressed enough in any discussion of the ARC, although it is often ignored. The lengthy reviews and releases undertaken in 2017-2018 and afterward are important for completing the task set out in the JFK Act. But the key records, documents, artifacts that together constitute the basic facts have been accessible to the public since 1998, if not long before. Post-1998 releases have added interesting details here and there, but they have not changed our basic understanding of central facts. Nor will they ever do so in the future.

Ted Sorensen: Writer of History or Creator of It?

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    In 1981, JFK Library director Dan Fenn informed me that the departments of State and Defense had signed off on declassifying the 43+ hours of White House tape recordings from the Cuban missile crisis. “You’re the historian,” he said, “listen to them.” For the greater part of the next two years, I became the first non-ExComm participant to listen to all the classified missile crisis tapes, as well as many other recorded meetings and private telephone conversations. It was a life-altering experience.[1]

    Nonetheless, even after all this time and study, a credible explanation for several of my personal Kennedy Library (JFKL) experiences remained elusive.

    In 1979, the JFKL was preparing to move from its temporary location in Waltham, Massachusetts to the permanent site at Columbia Point in Boston. Dave Powers, Jack’s former pal, and later the JFKL’s gatekeeper for the Kennedy family, was relaxing with a bottle of wine at a staff picnic. I casually asked about the controversy over whether JFK wrote the 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage. Powers smiled and replied, “Sheldon, do you really think that because I’ve had a bit to drink, I’m going to answer that?” The Kennedy family’s sensitivity on this question had already become well known.[2]

    JFK, a politician to the core, was always suspicious of the judgment and priorities of academic historians. In 1962, he groused to Professor David Herbert Donald about the facile hubris of historians’ surveys that rated presidents “below average” or as “failures.” He resented the whole process,” Donald vividly recalled. Kennedy relied instead on Ted Sorensen, my “intellectual blood bank,” and their relationship became virtually symbiotic. If JFK thought some document or statement should be put aside for the book they would later write about his administration—it was Sorensen he alerted. The president, during the missile crisis, had to admonish several ExComm members who questioned whether ‘speechwriter’ Sorensen should even attend these secret meetings. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Pulitzer Prize historian and White House special assistant, participated in just one meeting. Sorensen, however, was virtually omnipresent; he drafted messages to heads of state (including the letter to Nikita Khrushchev that led to a peaceful outcome), complex policy analyses and anything else required by the president at any time of day or night.

    In the mid-1980’s I flew to New York with a colleague for a meeting to reconsider opening some JFKL documents marked “personal.” Attorney Theodore Sorensen attended as well. After the committee’s business was concluded, food and ample drink were served; we called a cab to take us to the airport and offered to drop Sorensen off. Someone mentioned Profiles in Courage. Sorensen, perhaps less inhibited in this convivial atmosphere, suddenly exclaimed, “I wrote Profiles in Courage and much more,” followed by stunned and embarrassed silence. After we dropped him off, I wrote it down.

    Fast forward to 2007. Sorensen and I (my 2003 and 2005 books on the missile crisis had been published) were invited to speak at a Princeton University program to mark the 45th anniversary of the event. Sorensen was scheduled to be the first speaker. His assistant called to say they were stuck in traffic and the moderator asked me to speak first. About ten minutes into my remarks, the door to the theater opened and Sorensen came in on the arm of his assistant. (A stroke had damaged his optic nerve and left him blind.) He received a standing ovation from the audience and the panelists. Having arrived late, he had missed the introductions, and did not know exactly who was speaking. When I finished my account, Sorensen took the microphone and declared, “With all due respect, I am the only person in the room who was there in 1962.” He referred briefly to my “inaccurate” presentation and launched into a defense of the traditional Thirteen Days narrative: Bobby Kennedy as the leading opponent of military force, the importance of the celebrated “Trollope Ploy” in reaching a settlement, etc. During the Q&A after the panel, when my full name was mentioned, Sorensen added, “Oh, Sheldon, of course I know him. Wonderful book.” I passed a note to the moderator, “Should I take him on?” He shook his head, “no.”[3]

    When the program ended, Sorensen received another standing ovation and dozens of people lined up for questions or an autograph. No one asked about the tapes, and I was dismayed by the public appeal of celebrity over evidence. Is it possible to make sense of Sorensen’s reliance on these myths —a full decade after declassification of the ExComm recordings?

    The three episodes discussed above, it finally occurred to me, fit together much more coherently when viewed in the context of an earlier incident, then unknown to the public. In the spring of 1964, Attorney General Robert Kennedy turned up in Kenny O’Donnell’s office in the White House. (LBJ had persuaded key JFK men to stay on though the transition). RFK told O’Donnell that he had been working on a book about the missile crisis. White House staffer Dan Fenn later recalled that there had been many rumors about such a book—apparently intended for use in JFK’s 1964 reelection effort—just as the Kennedy campaigns had utilized John Hersey’s account of PT 109 in 1946 and Profiles in Courage in 1960. O’Donnell agreed to read the manuscript.

    When RFK returned, Fenn and O’Donnell’s secretary Pauline Fluet were also present. O’Donnell, known for his brusque, direct style, confronted RFK: “I thought your brother was president during the missile crisis?” “He’s not running, and I am,” [for the U.S. Senate from New York], Bobby replied, as Fenn recalled. Fluet cited a more personal, heartfelt response, “Jack wouldn’t mind.” RFK’s focus had apparently shifted from JFK’s reelection to his own political future. (After learning, decades ago, about the RFK-O’Donnell exchange from these two eyewitnesses, I searched without success in the relevant JFKL collections for any sign of the manuscript that RFK had brought to the White House in 1964).

    Dramatic evidence has survived that RFK’s personal political ambition was very much alive during the October 1962 crisis. Bobby told Soviet ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin that the secret US proposal to Moscow to inconspicuously remove the missiles from Turkey within a few months could not be revealed publicly and stressed that he could not “risk getting involved” in a possible leak “since who knows where and when…it can surface or be somehow published—not now, but in the future. The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future.”[4]

    Barely a year after RFK’s death, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis appeared, and quickly became the go-to source—the only such account by a “key member” of the ExComm. In 1999, a new edition, with a preface by Professor Schlesinger, claimed that the recent evidence “supplements and reinforces Robert Kennedy’s account in Thirteen Days.” Both editions are all but silent on the role of Ted Sorensen in writing this astonishingly influential book. He is, in fact, all but invisible in Thirteen Days, except for a very brief signed note claiming that RFK “wrote this book in the summer and fall of 1967 . . . but never had an opportunity to rewrite or complete it.” Of course, this claim begs the inevitable question: then who did?[5]

    In his final 2008 memoir, Counselor: A Life on the Edge of History, Sorensen continued to cling to the “Trollope Ploy.” When Khrushchev publicly urged a trade of the Cuban missiles for NATO missiles in Turkey, JFK remained unmoved by RFK and Sorensen’s efforts to pressure him back to his earlier offer to remove the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba. The president reluctantly agreed to try their letter, “this thing,” as he dismissively called it; but his tone was skeptical and impatient [listen to the tapes!] and he continued, with Dean Rusk, to pursue diplomatic options well into the night.

    Sorensen’s memoir also repeated the false contention in Thirteen Days that RFK was the leader of the ExComm doves. The recordings prove incontrovertibly that RFK was a persistent hawk. On the first day, October 16, Bobby opposed bombing the Cuban missile sites: “You are going to kill an awful lot of people and take an awful lot of heat on it.” Schlesinger, who discovered this quote when researching his 1978 RFK biography, concluded “It was Robert Kennedy who stopped the air strike madness in its tracks.” RFK actually denounced the bombing as inadequate and instead demanded a full-scale military invasion of Cuba! On the last day, October 27, at the close of the final late evening meeting, McNamara urged massive, immediate, air and ground military intervention: “and then we have to have two things ready, a government for Cuba because we’re gonna need one after we go in with 500 aircraft. And secondly, some plans for how to respond to the Soviet Union in Europe, cause sure as hell they’re gonna do something there.” “I’d like to take Cuba back,” RFK mused, “That would be nice.” Someone teased that Bobby could be made mayor of Havana and the recording ended in a burst of nervous laughter.[6]

    RFK and Sorensen’s last-minute plan (the “Trollope Ploy”), affirmed in Thirteen Days and reaffirmed in Counselor some forty years later, allegedly preserved the peace on that climactic thirteenth day. “Our” [italics added] letter “to Khrushchev had worked,” Sorensen persisted. By continuing to defend this “brilliant ploy” after the ExComm recordings were declassified, Sorensen, in failing health, only managed to delay a full public reckoning with the startling new recorded evidence. As a result, Theodore C. Sorensen’s most consequential work remains at the “edge” rather than at “the epicenter” of the historical record—in service to the myths he crafted and defended to the end.

Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977 to 2000 and is a member of Washington Decoded's editorial board.

 

[1] For a detailed description of that one-off, “fly on the wall” experience, see Sheldon M. Stern, Averting ‘the Final Failure’: John F. Kennedy and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), xiii-xxx.

[2] John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: Harper, 1956). David R. Stokes, JFK’s Ghost: Kennedy, Sorensen and the Making of Profiles in Courage (Guildford, CT: Lyons Press, 2021), is a thoroughly researched study concluding that Sorensen wrote the 1957 book. Biographer Herbert S. Parmet reached the same conclusion after reviewing the files in the Sorensen papers for Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1980).

[3] On the evening of October 26, a worried Khrushchev sent a private message to Kennedy proposing to withdraw the missiles from Cuba in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. Hours later, Khrushchev stunned the ExComm by publicly offering via Moscow Radio a mutual withdrawal of the Cuban missiles and the NATO missiles in Turkey. The so-called “Trollope Ploy” (named for a literary conceit in which a casual interaction is willfully misconstrued as an offer of marriage) was the supposed plan to publicly accept the first, private offer while ignoring the second public message. JFK agreed to try this scheme, but was certain it would fail. The president and Secretary of State Dean Rusk privately pursued a secret, back-channel deal to remove the Turkish missiles soon after the Cuban missiles were withdrawn. But, the deal remained secret for decades and the “Trollope Ploy” lived on as the public explanation. See “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” in Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012) 134-147.

[4] Stern, Averting the Final Failure, 403.

[5] Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Soon after the publication of Thirteen Days, former secretary of state Dean Acheson reacted to the claim that Dean Rusk “had other duties during this period of time and frequently could not attend the meetings.” Acheson sneered, “One wonders what those ‘other duties and responsibilities were,’ to be half so important as those they replaced.” Rusk, in fact, attended nineteen of the twenty meetings between October 16 and 27—missing only one because he was required by protocol to host a dinner for visiting Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. See, “The Real Robert Kennedy,” in Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 40-53.

[6] Schlesinger was given special access to the still classified RFK papers by the Kennedy family. He could not possibly have known the full content of the RFK quote he had discovered.

©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern

 

 

Bundy on Bundy: JFK’s National Security Adviser Listens to the Cuban Missile Crisis Recordings

 

 

 

By Sheldon M. Stern

 

    In the nearly three decades since the declassification of the secret recordings of the Cuban missile crisis ExComm meetings, I have often been asked if the recordings add anything vital to our grasp of that singular event. The answer is irrefutable: yes!

    That question also led me to wonder whether any of the key ExComm participants ultimately learned anything from the recordings. The tapes were not declassified until 1996 and by then most ExComm survivors were quite elderly. However, years earlier, McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s special assistant for national security, received clearance from the National Archives to listen to still-classified tapes from the first day (Tuesday, 16 October 1962) and also from the pivotal last day (Saturday, 27 October 1962).

    One afternoon in the 1980s I was surprised to see Bundy, then in his sixties, preparing to eat a meal in the Kennedy Library staff lunchroom. I introduced myself as the JFK Library historian, and explained that I had previously listened to the missile crisis tapes all the way through to the November lifting of the naval quarantine. Bundy looked incredulous at first, but after I alluded briefly to my background (Harvard PhD) he seemed more interested and at ease. Eventually, he acknowledged that he having difficulty identifying some speakers and I offered to help. Bundy had, of course, worked with these ExComm members and it almost seemed presumptuous for me to tell him who was talking. I explained, however, that when a speaker did not have a distinctive or familiar voice, I had compared it to other tape recordings on which the speakers were clearly identified, enabling me to recognize the voices of Paul Nitze, Roswell Gilpatric, John J. McCloy, U. Alexis Johnson, and several others. If the Boston twang of the Kennedy brothers occasionally made them difficult to distinguish, I was usually able to examine the context of the discussion to determine whether the president or attorney general was speaking.

    Bundy and I spent six absorbing hours in the classified national security vault listening to the October 27th tapes. He had been, the recordings proved, a consistently tough and outspoken critic of the president’s views—which was, of course, his job as White House national security adviser. He knew that JFK did not wish to be surrounded by sycophants. Bundy was also the only participant who openly questioned the president’s judgment and decisions by frequently using the personal pronoun “I” to explain what “I myself would do” in this situation—leading the president to respond impatiently, “I want everybody to understand it, Mac, if you don’t mind.”[1]

    “There may be an advantage,” Bundy suggested in his memoir, “in combining in one account what I know as a participant and what I have since learned from the work of others and from my own study.” These formerly top-secret recordings thoroughly document Bundy’s distinctive role during the ominous October 27th meetings—revised and corrected by the startling new evidence on these scratchy, low fidelity, but irreplaceable and indispensable recordings.[2]

    The most widely-read book about the crisis has been Robert F. Kennedy’s Thirteen Days. It has never been out of print; created the interpretive paradigm for the crisis; and inspired several documentaries and two Hollywood films. Yet many of its key conclusions have been exposed as flatly untrue by the tapes. RFK appears to have chosen to settle personal scores with argumentative participants like Bundy—accusing him “of strange flip-flops . . . . First, he was for a [missile] strike, then a blockade and then for doing nothing . . . because it would upset the situation in Berlin, and then, finally, he led the group which was in favor of an air strike . . . without prior notification, along the lines of Pearl Harbor.” He also claimed that Bundy “had been irresolute or weak-willed.”[3]

    The decisive moment of the crisis arrived on Friday evening, October 26, when Khrushchev sent a lengthy, emotional message to Washington. He insisted that the missiles in Cuba were defensive and proposed removing them in exchange for a US pledge not to invade the island. The next morning the ExComm was stunned to learn about an entirely new offer, made publicly on Moscow Radio, to remove the Cuban missiles if the US removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The president immediately asked what negotiations had taken place with the Turks, noting that he had been considering such a move since the first day of the crisis. Bundy urged JFK not to soften his resolve and asserted that “I would stick to the terms in the Friday letter.” The president insisted that world opinion would back the trade—because “it will look like a very fair trade . . . . you’re going to find a lot of people thinking this is a rather reasonable position.” “That’s true,” Bundy conceded, but “privately we say to Khrushchev: ‘Look, your statement is very dangerous . . . You’d better get straightened out . . . . The current threat to peace is not in Turkey—it is in Cuba.’ JFK countered, “They’ve got a God[damn] . . . they’ve got a very good proposal, which is the reason they’ve made it public.”

    Bundy soon reported that he had contacted the US ambassadors to France and NATO “who confirmed that the “knockdown of the Cuba-Turkey link” had been well-received by the allies. No such inquiry had been explicitly authorized by the president at the ExComm meetings, yet JFK did not comment on or make an issue of Bundy’s potential brush with insubordination.

    “It’s one thing to stand them down,” Bundy repeated, “to reduce the likelihood of a Soviet attack on Turkey . . . . It’s quite another thing to trade them out.” But Kennedy countered again that “most people will regard this as not an unreasonable proposal, I’ll . . . tell you that!” Bundy remained unconvinced: “But what ‘most people’ Mr. President?” JFK shot back, “I think you’re gonna have it very difficult to explain [Kennedy often fractured grammar in tense moments] why we are going to take hostile military action in Cuba . . . when he’s saying, ‘If you get yours out of Turkey, I’ll get ours out of Cuba.’ I think you’ve got a very tough one here. Let’s not kid ourselves”—a remark he repeated three times. “I don’t see why we pick that track,” Bundy persisted, “when he’s offered us the other track in the last twenty-four hours.” JFK cut him off, “Well, he’s offered us a new one! . . . in fact, all these matters can be discussed if he’ll cease work [in Cuba].” Then the president paused dramatically for about six seconds before concluding bleakly, “And then where are we? . . . if that’s part of the record, then you don’t have a very good war.” “NATO may be firm now,” he warned, in language evocative of his letters home during World War II, but “we all know how quickly everybody’s courage goes when the blood starts to flow.”

    “I myself,” Bundy pronounced again, would send back word that they have to do better than this public statement . . . and get [Khrushchev] back to where he was last night. JFK recommended requesting an emergency Sunday meeting of the NATO council. “No,” Bundy countered, “I would not do it tomorrow, Mr. President, myself!” JFK ignored him, reiterating that “time is running out . . . . It’s got to be finessed. We have to finesse [Khrushchev].” The national security chief remained convinced that NATO would conclude that “we were trying to sell out our allies for our interests. It’s irrational, and it’s crazy, but it’s a terribly powerful fact.”

    The tapes confirm that Kennedy was convinced that the Soviet premier would not, and could not, return to his Friday proposal after moving on to a tougher public position on Saturday. RFK and special assistant Ted Sorensen urged the president to send a letter to persuade Khrushchev to return to the Friday proposal. Kennedy agreed to send it, but his indifferent tone suggests no confidence in that idea; he referred to the letter as “this thing.” JFK was certain that political pressure around the world would make it impossible for Khrushchev to swallow an offer he had abandoned.

    Some readers may be wondering about the so-called “Trollope Ploy”—a scheme designed to assist the administration in concealing the truth about the secret deal that ended the crisis. Thirteen Days credits RFK with the idea. JFK, however, phoned former presidents Eisenhower, Truman, and Hoover on Sunday and lied about the deal, insisting that he had pressured Khrushchev back to the Friday proposal. Ike was impressed: “this is a very conciliatory move he’s made”—the “Trollope Ploy” before it had a name.[4]

    Bundy’s memoir largely ignored his abrasive and officious exchanges with the president. That regrettable decision deprived historians and the public, before the tapes were available, of unique evidence and insight into the personal, emotional, and human realities of these discussions. (The possibility that Bundy acted as ExComm “devil’s advocate” is effectively belied by these taut, quarrelsome recorded clashes.)

    Bundy stood by the 1962 US line that “the crisis was brought on” by Khrushchev. “We have a list of sabotage options, Mr. President,” which included removing Castro. “I think it would need your approval . . . . Post-Castro Cuba, is the most complex landscape.” JFK concurred that Khrushchev had “initiated the danger . . . he’s the one playing God, not us.” These covert US schemes, kept secret from the American people, were no secret to the USSR and Cuba, and help explain Khrushchev’s gamble to protect Cuba with Soviet missiles.

    The international political appeal of Khrushchev’s Saturday message, Bundy reluctantly agreed, had negated the first proposal “Yet, in the end,” he concluded, “President Kennedy not only chose that [public] course but recognized the importance of giving it clear [public] priority over any effort to persuade the Turks” to accept a missile trade. In fact, this was a shrewd and devious half-truth. JFK never expected the ploy to succeed—a fact Bundy well understood. Yet the president used the Friday letter gambit (as he had done in the call to the former presidents) as a public cover story to conceal the behind-the-scenes Turkey-Cuba trade.

    Bundy was impressed by the contributions of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who resisted the missile trade during the meetings, but also shared the president’s aversion to allowing “an intransigent position on these unwanted weapons stand between his country and the safe removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba . . . [which] was worth many times any possible cost.”
Bundy’s own judgment, a quarter century later, echoed both JFK and Rusk:

   Kennedy’s understanding of the political power of Khrushchev’s second letter made him pessimistic about the prospect of success in returning to the first . . . .  Twenty-five years have passed, and I find myself less impressed by my own insistence on the reality of NATO sentiment than I am by the president’s unwavering recognition that the basic interest of all concerned was to find a peaceful end to the crisis and that the Turkish missiles, whatever the opinions of allies, did not justify bloodshed in Cuba.[5]

 

Sheldon M. Stern was John F. Kennedy Library Historian from 1977-2000. He had the unique opportunity to hear and evaluate all the Cuban missile crisis recordings two decades before they were declassified. He is the author of Averting the Final Failure: JFK and the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Meetings (2003);  The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (2005); and The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths vs. Reality (2012).

 

[1] Sheldon M. Stern, “The Selective Memory of McGeorge Bundy,” in The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, Myths vs. Reality (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 119-128.

[2] McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988) 391.

[3] Sheldon M. Stern, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: The Real JFK White House Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Len Scott and R. Gerald Hughes, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Critical Reappraisal (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2015) 204-224.

[4] Stern, “The Trollope Ploy Myth,” Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, 134-147.

[5] Bundy, Danger and Survival, 430, 436.

©2024 by Sheldon M. Stern

Unwarranted Claims and False News in The New York Times

Print

 

 

By Barton J. Bernstein

 

 

    After we had been advised that the nation first [having the A-bomb] would be able to terminate the war at once . . . , I was convinced that we should proceed with all possible speed to develop and use the all powerful weapon. . . I was confident that the [secret] securing of the funds . . . would not present a difficult problem.

                               Senator Elmer Thomas (D-Oklahoma)[1]

 

    In January 2024, a Washington-based New York Times reporter, Catie Edmondson, landed a journalistic plum: a “Reporter’s Notebook” article on the front-page of the newspaper, complete with a two-page spread inside the paper, with illustrations. She presented the story as a pioneering article that allegedly uncovered a hitherto unknown, or little known, secret: precisely how the US government funded the atomic bomb during World War 2. The Times underscored the seeming importance of the article by featuring, above the fold, a picture of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime director of Los Alamos and “father of the A-bomb,” along with Army General Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Other photos inside further emphasized what the editors apparently deemed as her article’s significance.[2]

    A 2018 Barnard graduate, and former editor-in-chief of the Columbia University Daily Spectator, Edmondson has been with the Times for almost six years. She has covered congressional matters since 2018, although in 2023 she also wrote some articles about Germany. Edmondson, who started at the Times on a James Reston Reporting Fellowship, could fairly be described as a rising star at the newspaper.

    Her “Reporter’s Notebook” article was ostensibly about history, but also concerned an issue of great continuing import. That secret wartime funding may reasonably be considered the precedent for postwar “black budget” financing in various parts of the US military and intelligence budgets. It is a subject that, despite many publications over the years, still invites more research, and more analysis.[3]

    Edmondson, by her own admission, was initially ignorant about secret wartime A-bomb funding, and it may well be commendable that she sought to learn about it. Given that hers was not just another article, but prominently displayed on the newspaper of record’s front page, it is important to understand how she went about researching the matter, what she learned, and what, if anything, she contributed to general knowledge.

    Lamentably, Edmondson’s self-celebrated research did not advance understanding of the subject in any significant way. She discovered and reported what has mostly been long known, though she did not present it as such. At the same time, she made a number of errors, and ignored or omitted much important information and context. Notably, she failed to consult many monographs, memoirs, and biographies published in the last several decades covering the events she claimed to examine afresh, and thus displayed an ignorance of the extensive scholarship by historians deeply familiar with the archival records. Ultimately, the prominence of her article, juxtaposed with its significant faults, constitutes a troubling failure in meeting the standards of journalistic responsibility. The Times ill-served its readers.

    Had Edmondson’s subject been obscure history, her article, with all its faults, might not warrant sustained attention. But since it concerns a subject of continuing importance, and because the article seems to have served as a springboard to an increasingly frequent and prominent role for Edmondson at the newspaper of record, it would seem the article deserves critical discussion and analysis. This is particularly true, moreover, since the Times has not deigned to issue even modest corrections or disclaimers. The Times’s response to public and private criticisms that have been leveled so far has basically been a non-response. The Times, put simply, has stonewalled.[4]

Boosterism and the Article

    Edmondson’s enthusiastic, and apparently self-pleased, 19 January article was soon followed by a Times podcast, conducted by Sabrina Tavernise. The podcast consisted of a friendly interview with Edmondson about her research and findings, which were admiringly and uncritically treated as important and revealing, almost a celebration of her resourcefulness, prowess, and seeming discoveries. Reference to the podcast appeared on page 2 of the print edition (“Inside the Times: The Story Behind the Story”), and was entitled, “Once the Credits Roll, Reporting Begins.” In sum, Edmondson’s article received about as much play and attention as the Times can lavish on an article nowadays, short of nominating it for a Pulitzer Prize.

    Instead of being handled with such self-regard, Edmondson’s article should have been fact-checked, and then modestly presented, and explicitly treated, as a useful but severely limited, and rather selective, summary of what had been largely known for more than a half century about the secret A-bomb financing, with some candid acknowledgment of what, though very limited, was added and thus new. Admittedly, to place in the Times a restatement, at some length, of essentially known matters might be useful to many readers, but that should have been stated up front in the article and the podcast. The implication in both was very different: Edmondson’s report, and findings, were portrayed as startling, revealing, and remarkably new.